The race to lead the Ontario Progressive Conservatives has a new frontrunner: Patrick Brown, the socially conservative outsider who’s promised to raze the party structure before rebuilding it.

After Saturday’s deadline for signing up new Tories who’ll be eligible to vote in the party’s May leadership election, Brown’s campaign boasted it had registered more than 40,000, a huge number in a provincial party contest.

Christine Elliott, the party’s deputy leader and health critic who barged into the race early and racked up big donations and blue-chip endorsements, didn’t release a number. Leaking Tories put her figure at about 13,000, which counter-leakers among the Elliottites said was maybe half her real figure. Even 26,000 would be a bad showing for someone with all her advantages.

There are variables that mean this isn’t quite Brown’s race to lose.

The main mission for leadership candidates in the last several months has been these membership sales, but new Tories can sign up directly through the party website or through local riding associations. New party members, however they come in, can vote for whomever they want.

The party brass have to confirm all the new members and make sure there are no duplicates or phoneys. The numbers would have to be way, way off for the basics to swing in Elliott’s favour, but you could construct a scenario in which Brown’s figures are overstated, Elliott’s are understated, and third candidate Monte McNaughton has enough support to throw the contest one way or the other.

Most importantly, getting brand-new Tories to sign membership forms after listening to Brown speak is different from getting them to vote two months from now. By his own strategy, which has seen him speak to any group that would listen to him in any tiny joint in any hamlet in Ontario, Brown’s new members are less committed to the party than the now-and-forever Tories who’ve mainly lined up behind Elliott. Some percentage of Brown’s people will, come voting time in May, have wandered off.

The formidable machine that pulled 40,000 people into the Progressive Conservative party will be the one pushing them to cast ballots for Brown. Do not assume it’ll fall apart.

There’s a reason he’s so good at this: Brown is not quite the outsider he claims. He’s a former vice-president of the provincial party, a conservative activist whose career has been in elected office.

He’s a highly skilled politician, though a life like the one he’s led so far does bring its problems. At 36, he has no visible interests outside politics other than liking hockey quite a bit. Foreign affairs, a field almost useless in provincial government, has been the focus of his efforts. He’s been an MP since 2006 and never been within shouting distance of cabinet, not so much as parliamentary secretary to the minister of international co-operation.

Hard-right groups love him: He has a perfect voting record as far as the Campaign Life Coalition is concerned, on issues from gay marriage to abortion rights to opposing legal rights for the transgendered. He gets a B on gun rights from the National Firearms Association, the same as, say, Stephen Harper and Jason Kenney.

He’s cozied up to MPPs Rick Nicholls (last seen publicly doubting evolutionary science) and Jack MacLaren (who tried to scrap the Niagara Escarpment Commission because it bugged a friend of his in the landowners’ movement).

In short, if Ontario’s conservatives think their last leader, Tim Hudak, failed because Ontarians couldn’t relate to a lifelong politician from the party’s right wing, Patrick Brown isn’t the solution.

Plenty of conservatives don’t think that. Plenty of conservatives think their party has failed since 2003 because they haven’t offered a strong conservative alternative to the Liberals, sold by a skilled enough leader. Centrists and liberals would prefer it if the Tories’ problem were that the voters are centrists and liberals, but all those thousands of people joined the Progressive Conservative party under the Brown banner for a reason.

Yet that’ll be the message Elliott — lawyer and banker who had a full career before entering politics, mom and widow — will have to push if she’s going to pip Brown at the post.

The Tories know they’ve failed repeatedly when they’ve asked Ontarians to vote for them, but they haven’t agreed on why. By May, when they decide who will lead them out of the wilderness, they’ll have to make up their minds about how they got there in the first place.

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